Living In Our Own Realities

GORE VIDAL USED TO refer to The United States as "the fun house". By that he presumably meant that nothing is as it seems, that reality, in America, is obscured by fantasy, and that the fantasy comes to us from above, from our corporate masters, with their billions of dollars spend on advertising and propaganda. They tell us that the economy improves when taxes are cut on the wealthy, and that raising wages for workers damages the economy, that doing so kills jobs, and other garbage, much of which we in the United States of Amnesia (another Gore Vidal moniker) soak up thoughtlessly; the mythology, the lies, the fantasy, we embrace it sheepishly, without a whimper of protest or question, because we want to, and we have the right to. How can our wealthy corporate leaders possibly be wrong? A new book by Kurt Anderson, "Fantasy Land: How America Went Haywire", picks up on the same theme, and provides a comprehensive analysis of the American love of the unreal, which he proves is deeply rooted in our history, from the pilgrims onward to Barnum and Bailey and our huge free market entertainment industry, which specializes in fantasy. Welcome to the United States of advertising. A sizable percentage of the American people believe in speaking in tongues, and in the rapture, but do not believe in climate change. Since it isn't in the Bible, and since its implications are ominous for capitalism, why believe in it? We are all free to choose our own reality, to have our own facts. Its an inherent right to believe that we know more than the experts. We Americans have become tired of experts. After all, they tell us so many things we would rather not hear. Twenty five percent of we the American people believe that vaccinations cause autism, although there is no evidence that they do, and the medical and scientific professions tell us, without equivocation, that they do not. We were told that vaccines are harmful by an attractive movie star, and, for us, that was good enough. To hell with what the scientists and doctors say. Conspiracy theories are an American specialty. Large swaths of the population believe that bottled water is fundamentally more pure than tap water, although any lab analysis shows that there really is not much to be gained by paying big prices for store bought water. Nine eleven was an inside job, maybe the work of some dark and obscure part of the U.S. government. UFOs, plots to kill Kennedy, the list of secret pseudo knowledge is endless. No matter how much evidence, or lack of evidence accrues, our fantasies linger. We are not an evidence based society. We are a culture which celebrates the right of every citizen to think and believe whatever one chooses, and we tend to believe that all beliefs are created equal, which they most assuredly are not. In America, we believe whatever we choose, notwithstanding proof to the contrary. Its the penalty we pay for being a nation of dreamers, who, as Goethe said about all humans: "resist the truth only because we fear we might perish if we accepted it."